criterionforum.org

Andrea Kalas on restoring The Sheik:
http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php
(scroll down to the story, dated Nov. 02, 2021)

Garden of the Finzi-Continis restored by Ritrovata; review of a French Blu (no English subs):
https://www.dvdclassik.com/test/blu-ray ... i-m6-video

On rights problems and restoration work for the films of Alain Tanner:
https://cinebulletin.ch/fr_CH/article/a ... ain-tanner

Mention of a resto of Charles Dead or Alive:
https://www.cinematheque.ch/f/galeries/ ... tion-film/
https://www.cinematheque.ch/f/diffusion ... in-tanner/

Swiss Cinematheque restos of Romeo and Julia in the Village (1941), The Unknown Man of Shandigor (1967), Alpine Fire (1985), Tanner´s La Salamandre and Jonas Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000, and Kuhle Wampe (1932):
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rom ... ZdsTR5N0kE

Kuhle Wampe at the 2021 Ritrovato festival:
https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/e ... ie-welt-2/

Carlotta Films, France, has restos of Accattone, Mamma Roma, Truffaut´s Antoine Doinel films, six films directed by Kinuyo Tanaka:
https://variety.com/2021/film/global/ca ... 235089030/

Restored Praesens-Film productions:
https://www.cinematheque.ch/f/diffusion ... sens-film/

Really hope to see restorations of the Tanner films make it to subbed home video....

Michael Kerpan wrote: Wed Nov 10, 2021 2:29 am Really hope to see restorations of the Tanner films make it to subbed home video....

It's such a shame that Tanner seems to have fallen out of favor with cinephiles. I don't see many appreciations of his work, and retrospectives are very rare. He was extremely popular during the 70's and 80's, and his collaborations with John Berger were published as well. New Yorker released many of them on VHS, at least through In the White City

Restorations at the 2022 Rotterdam festival include The Lady from Constantinople (Judit Elek, Hungary, 1969) and Every Week Seven Days (Eduard Grecner, Czechoslovakia, 1964):
https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2022/films/the ... tantinople
https://iffr.com/en/iffr/2022/films/eve ... seven-days
More titles to be announced.

Colorgrade, a Swiss post-production house, mentions restorations of Tanner´s Les hommes du port, Retour d´Afrique, Messidor and Une flamme dans mon coeur, and Heute nach oder nie (Daniel Schmid) on their FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/colorg ... pa=HASHTAG
https://colorgrade.ch/filmographie/

Colorgrade also restored Francis Reusser's Derborence, which looked pretty good.
La salamandre was released by Tamasa on Blu-ray in France in 2019, it was restored by Cinegrell (no subtitles at all on the BD).
Jonas Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 was projected at Lyon Film Festival 2021. L'inconnu de Shandigor & Alpine Fire were projected to professionnals at MIFC 2021.

This 2K restoration marks the 20th anniversary of Zacharias Kunuk’s landmark work, named in a 2015 TIFF poll as the greatest Canadian film ever made: https://letterboxd.com/tiff_net/story/t ... tanarjuat/

Any chance Criterion releases this?

The Elegant Dandy Fop wrote: Thu Sep 16, 2021 5:15 pm Also a directed by Kinuyo Tanaka retrospective presented by Carlotta. I could see Arrow potentially releasing this in the US other than the fact a couple of the films are Toho releases.

A boxed set of all six films would be great!

There will be a French BD boxset by Carlotta.

A 4K restoration of Miike's Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), which was apparently his first film to make it out of Japan, is playing next Friday in Montreal as one of the Fantasia Film Festival's 25th anniversary screenings.

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote: Fri Dec 03, 2021 7:04 pm A 4K restoration of Miike's Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), which was apparently his first film to make it out of Japan, is playing next Friday in Montreal as one of the Fantasia Film Festival's 25th anniversary screenings.

The website for the film festival states that it's a 4K restoration that comes from the last surviving 35mm print. Curious to see how it will look if it's not coming from the negatives (or even an IP), especially since the film was released 25 years ago.

More titles announced for the 2022 TCM Film Festival: https://filmfestival.tcm.com/programs/
Includes Force of Evil (billed as a recent UCLA & Film Foundation restoration), Baby Face (1933) and Counsellor at Law (1933).

yoloswegmaster wrote: Fri Dec 03, 2021 7:14 pm

The Fanciful Norwegian wrote: Fri Dec 03, 2021 7:04 pm A 4K restoration of Miike's Fudoh: The New Generation (1996), which was apparently his first film to make it out of Japan, is playing next Friday in Montreal as one of the Fantasia Film Festival's 25th anniversary screenings.

The website for the film festival states that it's a 4K restoration that comes from the last surviving 35mm print. Curious to see how it will look if it's not coming from the negatives (or even an IP), especially since the film was released 25 years ago.

Wow. I saw a 35mm print of it at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles circa 2007, and I wonder if that was the source for this. What a sad fate for a film that was
Miike's true stylistic breakthrough, and remains one of his most incredibly entertaining works. The first 20 minutes in particular (the ludicrous bathroom shooting
and the strip club) are some of his most memorable set pieces.

A 35mm print was screened in Tokyo last year as part of an all-night marathon of '90s Miike films (the others were Shinjuku Triad Society, Ley Lines, and Dead or Alive, also on 35mm). I have to assume this is the same print used for the scan, which means it should be a "clean" print with no burned-in subtitles. Of course it's also possible that a Japanese venue would show a print with English subtitles if nothing else were available.

MoMA’s To Save and Project line-up for the new year is now available, and speaking personally its a bumper crop of fascinating titles. I didn’t click through all though two I noticed attributed to Janus are a new resto of Renoir’s Lower Depths and The Eternal Breasts.

New resto of The Three Musketeers (1921):
https://filmpreservationsociety.org/inv ... u-ray-2021
https://www.hometheaterforum.com/commun ... ma.374496/

Other Film Preservation Society restos:
https://filmpreservationsociety.org/rescued
https://filmpreservationsociety.org/biograph-project

The new resto of The Three Musketeers was just on TCM last night/this morning. A good, big adventure film with Doug Fairbanks in his prime. It's currently available for streaming on the WatchTCM site.

First news re: Berlinale Classics 2022 - a restoration of Brüder (Werner Hochbaum, 1929):
https://www.berlinale.de/en/press/press ... 12072.html

The 2022 retrospective - “No Angels – Mae West, Rosalind Russell & Carole Lombard”:
https://www.berlinale.de/en/press/press ... 11946.html
https://www.deutsche-kinemathek.de/en/v ... gels#films

In this article about the process for the 4K restoration of 'Mothra', they reveal that the original negatives for Akira Kurosawa's 'I Live in Fear' have been discovered! They also confirm that films such as 'The Life of Oharu', 'Floating Clouds', and 'Japan's Longest Day' have also received 4K restorations.

yoloswegmaster wrote: Sun Jan 09, 2022 3:29 pm In this article about the process for the 4K restoration of 'Mothra', they reveal that the original negatives for Akira Kurosawa's 'I Live in Fear' have been discovered! They also confirm that films such as 'The Life of Oharu', 'Floating Clouds', and 'Japan's Longest Day' have also received 4K restorations.

Great news on Floating Clouds having been restored.

Just a reminder, To Save and Project is still on, beginning this Thursday, and it's a ridiculously packed program. MoMA is pretty strict about 1) being vaccinated, 2) wearing a mask and wearing it properly (above nose and mouth) and never taking it off during the film, 3) no food, drinks, vaping or smoking in the theaters (which is no surprise, they were always like that), so with that in mind, it's probably much safer than your average movie theater right now.

Info on the Mary Pickford Foundation´s restorations:
https://marypickford.org/preservation-work/
Completed titles: Fanchon the Cricket, Little Annie Rooney, Sparrows. In production: Stella Maris, My Best Girl and others.

They are also planning restorations of Sirk´s Sleep, My Love and other UA titles not starring Pickford.

Got out of work very early so I was able to catch some restorations today. Just some quick notes:

De cierta manera (One Way or Another) was originally shot on 16mm. During the printing process, the original negative was heavily damaged so it was shipped for repair to a Swedish laboratory where the negative was blown up from 16mm to 35mm. The restoration had to use the 35mm picture and sound dupe negative struck in 2008 as the OCN remains lost. The final result looks pretty gauzy and creamy, not as crisp and detailed as you'd like (especially during any opticals like titles/credits), but the scan and restoration is really well-done. The grain is pretty much left as-is, or at least looks that way, so even though the materials aren't optimal, they don't make any misguided attempts at "fixing" what can't be fixed.

Badou Boy has a 4K restoration from the internegative. (I don't recall any mention of the OCN, which I guess is lost.) In fact MoMA's press release says: "4K digital restoration by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata and L’Image Retrouvée laboratories." I looked this up afterwards because unfortunately the color timing doesn't look great. I've seen much worse, but from the very start you can tell the whole thing still has a slight yellow push, especially when you look at the blown out skies. A shame, because otherwise the scan looks great. I didn't realize Djibril Diop Mambéty made so few films. It's too late for Criterion to do this, but if rights allow, maybe someone in the UK can make a comprehensive set of complete films by Djibril Diop Mambéty. Despite my problems with the color, I'm sure this new restoration will make such a set more enticing.

The short film Suzanne Suzanne looks GREAT. Kudos to IndieCollect, they couldn't have done a better job. The Young Girl didn't have that much restoration info ("4K digital restoration by Souleymane Cissé and the Cinémathèque française; courtesy Cissé Films"), but it looks good though the colors were not that brilliant - maybe that's just inherent in the original film stock? Also a lot of dialogue was not given subtitles - you can still follow the story easily, but much of the time, you get one translated line when something like two or three are spoken. Otherwise, texture/grain is excellent.